Vector Graphics is hard

For our next project we are working on Vector Graphics and logo design, something that I have never been very good at. To be clear, I am very enthusiastic about learning something new, but I'm also a little intimidated.

I installed Inkscape onto my computer, but we are using Adobe Illustrator at school. I also found this interesting font generator  It uses a now antique font generation language, originally designed to form templates that could be easily used across characters and platforms. It was a very ambitious project, and helped me in finding some fonts to use.

Before really talking about some of my crazy amateur-sauce ideas, I think that it makes sense to give some context about the kinds of brands that I really have respect for.

Probably my favorite brand is actually ETS Laboratories. I work with them a lot as a winemaker, and I appreciate the simplicity of their design and marketing materials. To be clear, Their "marketing materials" are usually full of really important cutting edge continuing education for the wine industry. Their logo is also pretty great:

It says it all. They measure things. They are a laboratory. They're called ETS. Simple. Delicious.

I like Orange amps. Not only is their sound un-paralleled, they're also pretty slick in terms of design. First lets look at the Logo:

The font is reminiscent of what many consider to be the "golden age" of British guitar: '70s prog rock. During the '80s and '90s all of the producers got into these solid-state amps, and they got a really bad reputation. Ironically, I think that this '70s stoner style has enjoyed far more success throughout music in the last couple of decades then it did in the '70s. So what I like about Orange's logo and aesthetic, is the simplistic yet powerful communication. Also, if you examine the product it's self, you'll see the continuity of design. There's also a reference to Britain's noble heritage with the coat of arms:

One more logo that I really enjoy is the logo for Tor Books. They primarily focus on sci-fi and fantasy books, but I think that you might get that impression from their logo:

Tor means mountain. Their logo isn't really a mountain, but a mountain realm. Like a place of great natural beauty enclosed in it's own reality, a reality that is propped up by the company: TOR. It's scalable. Having only three letters in the name affords them an enviable place in the world of brand recognition. Their other marketing materials could use a little help. But once you see the amateur sauce that I slapped together for this blog, I think that you'll agree that I'm not the one who should provide that help. At least not yet.
Some of my ideas might work for a future winery that I might start some day, maybe they'd work for other ideas. I spend a lot of my free time writing business plans for my "billion dollar ideas", and some of those ideas are expressed in these:

1. Bodega Cassiopeia Martinez (a tiara in the shape of the Walla Walla Valley)

2. Arc ( a lightning bolt)

3. N.Martinez & assoc. (a barrel stack)

4. Binary Citizen (A nine pointed star with a one and a zero in positions reminiscent of a clock)

5. Hex industries (a bee hive, hexagons)

6. Shelter me roofing (tile shapes)

7. Electro-Moto (diagonal lines)

8. Cuttle-tronic (Cuttlefish/robot)

9. Faraday (a cage of concentric squares)

10. CromaT4 (a pointillist grouping of colors)


Another aspect of  logo/brand design, is the color scheme. Every year Pantone decides the "color of the year", and it seems inappropriate to hold any conversation about color choices without discussing it in that context. This year's colors are officially "baby vomit pink" and "oxygen deprivation blue". Don't ask me why those color names came to my mind, but see for your self.

For my color combos, I'll explore the color wheel in Gimp and name them as I sees them. Forgive me for the crass nomenclature, I'm just wandering alone in a forest on this one:

Then we need to find? choose? create? ten fonts. I'm really not sure. I certainly have never been very good at vectoring my way through a font, but I have tried.  So first I'll present three examples from the Metaflop modulator:

1. Sliding hightail

2. Sultry Thickness

3. High steaks

Now four samples from my favorite commercial font site, Font squirrel.


4.Almendra

5. Deutsch-Gothic

6. Kingthings-Versalis

7. Molot
      --This is one of my favorite all time fonts. I just never have a place or time to use it.

And now I will attempt to "draw out" three fonts in my Sketch book.

And now, armed with all of this brainstorming, I'll do my best on my journeys into the world of VECTOR during class this week. wish me luck.

Phinishing the Fotomontage

This project was easy to start and very difficult to finish. As I said in the previous post regarding this project, our assignment is to create a new story by compositing at least five of the images from our "100 photograph" assignment from earlier in the quarter using Adobe Photoshop. At first I was able to do some quick copy+paste and fuzzy select to breeze right through the initial rotoscoping. Once the images were roughly compiled I had to dial in the colors, mask out the fine edges and address the lighting concerns.

It was one of these things where, the more I did, the worse it got. For one thing, in Photoshop the adjustment layers feature creates a lens across all of the layers underneath it. You can mask-out the areas that you want to keep out of the color adjustment, but it's time consuming and difficult to control. One of my favorite pictures was of my daughter. She was at the center of the image, staring at the veterans monument on the left hand side of the image. Unfortunately, I really had to retake the image, since she really is the focus of the image and she was not at the same resolution as the rest of the image.

While I was retaking the image, I was constantly either taking a blurry picture (with a wide F-stop) or a dark picture (with a narrow fstop). I had to choose one of the dark, saturated examples which led to a color clash with the rest of the image. I threw down an adjustment layer, masked out the rest of the image and feebly played with the color. At first I tried Curves, but every little adjustment would only dramatically saturate the image in a new direction. Then I tried a brightness/contrast in the hopes of washing her out a little bit, back into the blue surrounding her. I could not get the masking from the previous adjustment layer to copy+paste into the masking for the brightness/contrast layer, so I was kind of trapped masking it all over again. Anyway, it was a poor choice so I left it out. Then I tried a saturation/ hue layer, again tediously masking the whole thing out by hand. Again, I could not adjust the layer appropriately. I felt like I was typing with swollen digits, like I could so easily fix the problem in Gimp and sneaker-net it back over. But in the end, I also knew that the right attitude was to really push my self to learn the tools of the trade.

Alas, all projects must come to an end. I did the best I could with the time that I had. Could have been better. :(

Photomontage Reaction

After our "100 photos" assignment, we were tasked with creating a photo montage using at least five of the pictures that we took. Through this project we get a chance to use the Adobe Photoshop suite to tell a new story with our 100 photos. I have quite a bit of experience using The Gimp, so I've had a pretty easy time of learning the Adobe Photoshop tools. Photoshop is kind of like The Gimp, with the interface of Blender 3d. Honestly, I still haven't found a tool in Photoshop that isn't in The Gimp. The tools are a little different, sometimes they're a little easier, other times harder. It's a toss up.

For my 100 photos project, I took photographs in three or four places. I have a bunch of photos in a grave yard, another bunch in a park, a few at home of my kids, and a few at my winery. At first I thought that I would try to create a brutalist, architectural landscape using the mossy headstones that I had photographed. The Rhetorical implications should be obvious, I hope. Eventually I realized that I really didn't have the photos taken from the right angles to pull it off. There were just too many perspectives in any given montage that I tried to assemble. To clarify, I would just quickly open five or six images, do some selecting and command-c, command-v action to place them in the same photo. I used the fuzzy select to select and cut out the un-desirable areas. Its pretty easy and quick way to shuffle the images and get a good idea of what you have to work with.

In general, I found that my images were taken at extreme angles. These extreme angles tended to make the photos difficult to  paste together and maintain any sense of reality. The light variation, focus..etc made it pretty clear that pasting most of the pictures together would yield a relatively long project indeed. At some point, I thought: "screw reality". Why not just take one of these orb headstone images that I had captured, and turn it into a little planet for my children to play on (a la little prince). Before long I had a pretty dramatic image, composed of only three images. From there it really became difficult to imagine how I could add anything without just ruining the composition. So I started to really drill down, and work on the images themselves.

I did my lazy "fuzzy select, remove" technique on the chain in my photo montage, but I could not do that with much success in pulling the children out of their photograph. Instead I had to mask them out. From there I clone stamped, and airbrushed my way to appropriate detail and light in the image. Through the work, I realized that I could add two more images as subtle details in the image. In the middle of the action, I realized that the resolution on the image of my children was so poor, that it would really stand out in print. I'll have to re-take that image with one of the school's fancy pants cannons. I'm a little intimidated, that I might not get the candid nature of the photo again. On the other hand, the kids do spend a lot of time in that exact same position in front of the tv. Just sort of awestricken, while hamming it up for the camera. The image is still, very much a work in progress so I really don't know how it will look in the end.